Akshaya Jha, PhD, Assistant Professor of Economics and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University, will present the EEEP Seminar Series, “Blackouts: The Role of India’s Wholesale Electricity Market” on February 10, 2023.
Abstract: Electricity blackouts impose substantial costs on developing countries. We advance a new explanation for their continued prevalence in India, the world’s third-largest power sector. Using novel data spanning the sector, we demonstrate that wholesale power demand is elastic: demand falls when wholesale procurement costs rise. Supply-side misallocation increases costs, thereby decreasing the quantity of electricity supplied to retail customers. We highlight a key source of misallocation: discretionary power plant outages resulting from weak incentives rather than technical issues. Eliminating these outages significantly lowers procurement costs, increasing the quantity supplied by enough to eliminate blackouts for 8% of Indian households.
Speaker Bio: Akshaya Jha is an Assistant Professor of Economics and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University. Jha’s research interests lie at the intersection of energy and environmental economics and industrial organization. His research uses a combination of economic modeling and causal inference techniques to quantify the economic and environmental costs and benefits of a wide range of policies impacting wholesale electricity supply. In recent work, he has examined the introduction of financial trading to California’s wholesale electricity market, the phase-out of nuclear power in Germany, the dramatic growth of rooftop solar capacity in Western Australia, and the determinants of electricity blackouts in India. He received a BS in Economics and Statistics from Carnegie Mellon University, and a PhD in Economics from Stanford University.